QUESTIONS:

You are hungry and you do not want to eat on campus, where do you go? If it is Monday then Jimmy’s Tavern for the $5.00 burger special or Thai Time.

How do you de-stress when you are feeling overwhelmed? Take a break, play a video game or nap.

]]>Charles O. Thompson’s Vision for WPIhttp://wp.wpi.edu/library/2016/11/11/charles-o-thompsons-vision-for-wpi/
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 17:47:39 +0000http://wp.wpi.edu/library/?p=7497On November 11th, WPI celebrates Founders Day, commemorating the day the Institute first opened its doors. Each year, the Student Alumni Society (SAS) focuses its celebration on one of the nine Founders. They chose to honor Charles O. Thompson, WPI’s first Prinicipal (now known as President), for 2016.

In March 1868, the Board of Trustees elected Thompson, a 31 year-old high school administrator and civil engineer with a degree Dartmouth, to be Principal of the new school. They also appointed him to be professor of Chemistry. His single condition for accepting the position was that the opening of the school be postponed until at least November 1st, so that he could tour the technical schools of Europe in preparation.

Shortly after accepting the position, Thompson sent Stephen Salisbury and the Board a “Memorandum for organizing the Worcester County Free Institute of Practical Industrial Science.” In this document, he laid out his vision for the new school in “the fewest words as possible.”

“The corporate name seems rather heavy,” Thompson started the memo. “Some abbreviation will be indispensable for current use. A name should be an index rather than a compendium.” He suggested the school be called “The Worcester Technical School” instead. He mentioned that similar schools in Europe contain the words “Real, Technical, Industrial, and Polytechnic,” and suggested that the trustees consider doing the same. (Perhaps inspired by Thompson’s thoughts, the school did officially change its name to “Worcester Polytechnic Institute” in 1887 under President Fuller.) “The school is… to furnish an education based on the natural sciences, the mathematics and the modern languages,” Thompson continued. “It is not a place where boys can learn trades.” Washburn Shops, the vision of another founder, Ichabod Washburn was completed after Boynton Hall. It offered a place where students were apprentices to tradesmen and focused on learning how to produce commercial products. The proper role of the Shops in the larger picture of the Institute would be hotly debated long after Thompson’s presidency ended.

Later in the letter, Thompson recommended the Institute hire a math teacher named Harriet Goodrich. Miss Goodrich taught mathematics at Arlington High School where Thomposn served as principal and had “a great natural ability in this department and is of great dignity and refinement.” Miss Goodrich also happened to be Prof. Thompson’s sister-in-law. The trustees did hire Miss Goodrich, but she retired after one year of teaching due to bad health. Although other women were also hired over the years, female students were not admitted as undergraduates until 1968 – 100 years after the first class entered WPI.

The memorandum contains many more specifics concerning staffing and equipment for the new Institute in addition to Thompson’s European travels from New York to Belfast, Dublin, London, Paris, Lyon, Vienna, Zurich, and cities in Germany. He had already studied the plans of all of the scientific schools in America and with his new knowledge of the European schools he intended to shape the new institute into a world-class university. The Free Institute’s innovative approach to education stimulated the founding of other engineering schools which mimicked the WPI model. Thompson became well regarded as a visionary of scientific education through his work at WPI and was later hired as the first president of Rose Polytechnic Institute to implement his educational model honed at WPI.

The Thompson memorandum and other founding documents are held in the collections of Curation, Preservation, and Archives and can be viewed in the Fellman Dickens Reading Room, Level G, Gordon Library weekdays during term from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Prof. Heilman has been fascinated by the sky for many years. Although his early attempts to see the moon and stars were frustrated by a lack of equipment that would bring them close enough, his interest in space exploration grew, spurred on by sci-fi series like Star Trek and explorations by NASA and related organizations. Four years ago his wife bought him a computerized telescope that could automatically find objects and track the sky. He soon realized that if he used a camera with the telescope, he could get images that revealed more than his eyes could see. The camera also let him merge his knowledge of and passion for chemistry with astronomy. Through a complicated series of steps involving two cameras, filtering and separation of different wavelengths of light, and compositing hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, Heilman creates awesome images like those in CatchingtheLight.

Prof. Heilman says about the exhibition: “Most of the targets in this gallery exist within our own galaxy. They are the wondrous nebulae that showcase the stunning birth and death of stars just a few thousand light years away. Go further and you’ll escape our galaxy and trade nebulosity for the vastness of deep space. We then find floating among us, yet millions of light years away, the myriad galaxies that decorate our Universe. I wonder what the odds are of an alien astronomer snapping a picture of our galaxy right now! Smile… the odds are pretty good. Keep looking up!”

Gordon Library is kicking off its 2016-17 Meet the Author Series this Thursday at 4pm. Join us in the FLIP Space on the 3rd floor of the library, where Jim Cocola will give a talk on his new book Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2016).

Places in the Making maps a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century American poets who have used language to evoke the world at various scales. Distinct from related traditions including landscape poetry, nature poetry, and pastoral poetry—which tend toward more idealized and transcedent lyric registers—this study traces a poetics centered upon more particular and situated engagements with actual places and spaces. Focusing on poets of international reputation, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams, Places in the Making also considers work by more recent figures, including Kamau Brathwaite, Joy Harjo, Myung Mi Kim, and Craig Santos Perez.

“Jim Cocola’s Places in the Making brilliantly illuminates the affective and cognitive processes through which geographical spaces become inhabitable places.”
— Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

An informal reception with light refreshments will follow the book talk. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Jim Cocola is Associate Professor and Associate Head for the Humanities in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In research and in teaching, Professor Cocola focuses on intersections between geography and the humanities, primarily in the field of modern and contemporary American literature and culture.

]]>Enter to win the Fellman Prize!http://wp.wpi.edu/library/2016/10/28/enter-to-win-the-fellman-prize/
Fri, 28 Oct 2016 14:27:24 +0000http://wp.wpi.edu/library/?p=7444The Robert Fellman Memorial Scholarship Prize is awarded to a WPI undergraduate student for the best essay written about the life or work of the author Charles Dickens. The scholarship was established in the memory of the noted Dickensian Robert Fellman, who bequeathed his Charles Dickens collection to WPI in 1995. The collection includes many volumes of Dickens’s writings (including rare first editions of his major works); unique manuscripts and autograph letters; Dickens-related periodicals; letters, biographies, and illustrations; and many volumes of reference works, criticism and commentary on the novel, Dickens’s England, the Victorian period, and related English authors.

The essay must focus on some aspect of Charles Dickens’s life or work. The essay should be three to eight pages (750-2000 words) in length, double spaced.

The prize is $100. The winner will be announced in early February 2017, near the time of Dickens’s birthday. The winner will be invited to present the essay at the February meeting of the Worcester chapter of the Charles Dickens Fellowship. The submission deadline is 16 December 2016. Participants should send four copies of their essay to Fellman Prize c/o K. Markees, Gordon Library, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA, 01609, or simply attach an electronic copy to email addressed to archives@wpi.edu with “Fellman Prize” in the subject line.